When you’re lucky enough to count a member of The Royal Society of Biology, a Fellow of The Royal Society of Chemistry and a science social influencer and STEM Ambassador, who have all done amazing things in industry, as part of your Science Department, you know STEM Week is going to be a good one.
Each day started with a different guest speaker on topics such as ‘life on Mars’, ‘going to the moon’ and ‘how climate change affects evolution’. This year’s theme was ‘Exploring Beyond Boundaries’ and our own Y7s explored ideas of their own and delivered assemblies on Katherine Johnson, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page. Back in the labs we’ve enjoyed rocket making, creating parachutes to safely transport egganauts, explored microscopic organisms, handled meteorites from the moon and Mars and built rovers for planetary expedition.
STEM was not confined to science lessons. In English lessons, students explored Science-based short stories and analysed alien poetry. In maths, students designed and made rockets using different geometric shapes, one of which is designed to be launched using pressurised water and then returned to the ground with its own parachute. In French students watched a video about the CERN in French speaking Switzerland. CERN gathers 10,000 scientists from 70 countries. In lessons students talked about Mathematics as a language and the importance of languages in sciences to forge relationships with colleagues from different countries.
